Well...It's 1:12am on Saturday morning and I just finished getting everything packed and ready to go for the quest out west. My name is Marc and my riding buddies name is Chuck. We originally had a group of four, but due to medical reasons one had to cancel and the other decided not to go without his buddy. What a pal. Anyway the plan is to meet up with Chuck in St. Joseph, Mo. in the morning (roughly 8 hours) and take about 3 days to ride to Antelope Wells, NM., then ride up the Great Divide to the Canada boarder. If time allows we will go on into Canada to Banff, BC. We will then be riding back home from there. We will have 5000+ miles when completed.

I've always wanted to do a live ride report, so if cell phone and internet hotspots permit, I will be updating this post as we go. If not the ride report will follow. We've slated about 18 days to complete the trip.

Wow! I didn't think that riding our bikes to Antelope Wells,NM would take that much out of me! We have been riding pretty much non-stop since Sat. morning. Just stopped long enough to eat and sleep. Sorry for the delay. We are in Silver City, NM right now and are offically on the CD. I'm hoping to have more time to update this with some picture within the next couple of days. Was in the triple digits today, now that we are in higher elevation it is starting to cool off a little. Battery is about to die so I will post more later.

PS. Ed we have a good picture for you. It'll be the first one I post. I'm not sure how picture posting will go by the way because I'm using my cell phone for internet service. Hopefully it will work okay.

Wow! I didn't think that riding our bikes to Antelope Wells,NM would take that much out of me! We have been riding pretty much non-stop since Sat. morning. Just stopped long enough to eat and sleep. Sorry for the delay. We are in Silver City, NM right now and are offically on the CD. I'm hoping to have more time to update this with some picture within the next couple of days. Was in the triple digits today, now that we are in higher elevation it is starting to cool off a little. Battery is about to die so I will post more later.

Marc and Chuck

Highway and i have been watching the spot tracker. You guys made impressive time to the start. Highway feels Chuck should have the highway nickname after seeing your 40 mile interstate 10 detour.

My name is Marc and I'm on the left. Chuck is the migdet on the right!

This was just off of highway 81 about 25 minutes north of the border. The first dirt of the trip. This quickly turned into what looked like just a dry creek bed. I didn't get any pictures, I was to busy riding! Not to far in, one of my bungee cords broke and I lost my sleeping bag. The only reason I new that I had lost it was because my Frogg Togg rain gear got sucked up into my rear wheel locking it up! When I was trying to roll it back out of the wheel, my exhaust burned two really big holes in them. I just patched them with duck tape. Good as new, just not as pretty. Again no pictures, sorry I suck at taking pictures but I'm working on it.

We made it to Silver City,NM at the end of day one. We found a KOA campground to stay at. Chuck had to give the lady at the counter a hard time about the price. He was just kidding of course. His theroy is, if you don't razz them about the price, then they may think they aren't charging enough. He's funny! Anyway, again no pictures of the campground, I'm trying to get better at the picture thing.

This house was really neat it was surrounded by this rock bluff. It was in the middle of no where!

Taking a break

On the road, ur hum...trail again!

We ran into this father and son team, they were riding the divide north to south. I didn't get his name but I think he said his ADV name was Trailace. I hope I got that right.

Back to the trail!

This is one of my fav's of New Mexico.

Had to stop and take a picture of my ride.

I have to stop and talk about my Giant Loop gear. As you can see I have the tank bag and the saddle bags. I love these things. The saddle bags are easy to load and unload via the large zipper in the back. It's even easier to strap on and off the bike. The thing I like most is they are both waterproof! The tank bag is really easy to take on and off as well. The bag can be zipped off of the base for easy refueling or to just take it with you when you leave your bike. The base stays on the bike. The only thing I would change or add rather to the tank bag is an outside pocket on the back like the Wolfman's have. I didn't really even notice the saddle bags being there while riding in the rough stuff. They did make a really nice back rest too.

We made it to Pie Town only to find them closed, so we didn't get to have any pie. What a bummer! The lady did come out and talk to us while we where deciding if we were going to go to the other place to eat lunch. She was a nice lady. You should stop and eat some pie. (If they are open.) We decided not to eat, so we hit the trail again.

This was down the trail aways from Pie Town. (Taken facing south)

This was the road going into Zuni(Zumi?) Canyon just outside of Grants, NM.

Okay folks...here it is! Wait for it....wait for it!
The first campground picture. Another KOA in Grants, NM.

There aren't alot of pictures for day 3. I had trouble getting a patch to stick to the old tube, so I finally put in my spare tube. I figured I'd fix it later. This flat ended up eating up about an hour. We also had to re-route around some private property south of Cuba,NM. We ran into a lady and her kids who nicely informed us that we where on private land. I think we where only about 50 or 60 miles from Cuba when we meet her. This re-route ended up being about 180 miles. Needless to say there wasn't alot of time for pictures today.

Here's what I did manage to take.
This was on the private property.

It started raining on us late in the day so we started looking for a place to camp. We settle for Hopewell Lake State Park. It was just over 10,000 ft. We set our tents up in the rain (sprinkling). We went to bed pretty early this night. Needless to say I was wide awake about 2am. It was a very long night.

Great report!! Did you take Forest Rd 239A from Grant to Cuba by any chance? If so how was the road condition?

No, we started to go that way, but ran into a nice lady and her kids, who informed us that we were on private property. We had heard from someone that had came from that way that it was impassible though. We ended up finding a highway to get to Cuba.